Nose: A Novel

CHAPTER ONE

Black Bottle

1

HIGHER.

So Clyde Craven-Jones gripped that magnificent stomach of his and hauled it farther in the direction of his multilayered chin, the two masses of rendered haut cuisine and the very best wine momentarily married in a vast floodplain of undulating flesh, exposing a bit more of what there was of him down there, enough apparently because there she went, transformed into something feral, angular, beyond his control, her shifting hips as if on rails, the lovable little gap between her front teeth exposed, making that melodious sound Claire claimed she wasn’t aware of but that reminded him of mermaids singing in an unintelligible language of a place he had never seen.

Fog seemed to muffle the vineyard on the far slope. She, better mounted, speeded up their Thursday morning ritual, mindful not to kill him in the process. What determination his wife had: up at dawn for copulation, a third his weight, riding the vestiges of his pelvis until she collapsed, sometimes allowing him to go back to sleep for another hour, though not today, and waking him again for a simulation of breakfast.

At these moments she smelled a bit vinegary—seaweed?—from all the effort, the sharp aroma of bacteria overwhelmed by the ranker olfactory engine of sexual intercourse. He could pull all sorts of associations out of this basic act if he wanted, but Claire made more distracting noises. She was a gift, named for light but dimly outlined against the natural redwood ceiling of their Spanish colonial bungalow on the edge of a beautiful expanse of some of the most valuable agricultural land on earth: vines, olive trees, live oaks, and that dangerous scrubby stuff up there on the slopes just dying to catch flame and consume all that was good in Northern California.

Her sounds bordered upon desperation now. He envied her and at the same time was a little afraid: such passion. Clyde Craven-Jones was a prisoner of two sensualities—hers, and his just as relentless but involving no climaxes, whereas she rode raptly on, past the finish line and out onto the postorgasmic plain. There she sighed, succumbing to gravity, sliding from his girth and rolling onto the comforter, sides heaving, staring dazedly up at the reclaimed beams from a historic winery that after a century still smelled of fermentation.

Claire rose on one elbow, exhaled, and said with a smile, Well, BTDT, a jocularity intended to make her husband feel better about his, well, supine performance. True, he had been there, but he hadn’t done that. No matter; the day beckoned.

Anything special in the lineup?

Yes, you’re going to be challenged today, CJ. By this valley’s own. Nine Cabernets in the up bunch, which meant costing at least $130 a bottle.

Why not ten Cabernets? It was the usual arrangement of American grands crus.

Well, the tenth one’s a mystery. No label, nothing. I want to include it because it seems special and has been around for a bit. Arrived in a lovely cedar box, wrapped in a pashmina shawl.

Those things meant nothing. Vintners spend small fortunes encapsulating mediocre wine in a way that makes it seem of a higher order, the same logic used for building their expensive houses and wineries. Packaging, like labels, was deception. One of his duties as a premier wine critic—the premier wine critic, he liked to think—was to out deception in Craven-Jones on Wine, with its pass-along readership of, he often insisted, more than a million. How did it get here?

By hand, that’s all we know.

Why hadn’t the dog alerted them? Clyde Craven-Jones didn’t allow wine to be left on his doorstep; only the most audacious—or stupid—would attempt it. But he was curious, and any worthy critic welcomes the random chance to test his mettle. Besides, Claire had gone to the trouble of including it. Let’s begin.

Solemnly launching himself into a roll, the massive, custom-made bed protesting feebly, his wife nimbly getting out of the way. She went into the bathroom and he heard water filling a tub designed for corpulence beyond the American standard, with special handles for easing himself in and out. He thought he caught a trace of something floral—tansy? Camellia? His policy was no manufactured fragrances of any sort in the house, perfume being the worst, an assault fraught with plant renderings and mysterious chemical compounds that gave him an immediate migraine and affected his ability to taste. He demanded plain soap for his morning immersion, baking soda for his toothbrush, an electric razor for the graying scrim of beard accenting copious signature jowls.

2

IN TEAM VELOUR SWEATS—a gift from a wine distributor, unsolicited but comfy—and rope-soled espadrilles, Clyde Craven-Jones moves with deliberation from his boudoir to a hallway lined with cheaply framed photographs of himself with every personage in the wine world who matters, among them two of his late countrymen, noble, modest scholars of the grape and fine practitioners of the English language, both dead now.

He’s the last of the ranking Brits and long ago succumbed to the allure of the New World, with its lack of ceremony, its unblinkered heat that even in the straw-hued mirage of summer he finds preferable to the damp determinism of his native land.

And, of course, the California wines themselves: heavily extracted, endowed with strangely scented variants that his English colleagues found perverse but he has come to admire for their richness and power. He’s responsible for much of that intensity, favoring in his reviews those Cabernets and Pinot Noirs with some flesh on their bones, much to the disgust of the French who have been made to compete with California and what’s sometimes called the Craven-Jones style, lest they languish on shelves absorbing light and drying out like old men abandoned in a sauna.

He pushes open the door. The organ that matters most to him, that distinctive protuberance bigger than other men’s, more sensitive, gifted, in fact, beyond the bounds of ordinary human perceptiveness—his nose—has guts of its own. Also the ability to raise its lucky owner to the top of his profession and into the company of some of the wealthiest, most talented, sometimes most reprehensible people on earth, an appendage so remarkable that it has appeared in the pages of a leading newsweekly: slightly hooked, increasingly veiny, near infallible.

The former dining room is heavily draped, temperature controlled, with overhead track lighting, racks of Riedel glasses in every imaginable contortion for concentrating aromas, open cartons of wine, unlined writing pads, 3B drawing pencils—no pens!—a sterling spit bucket with splash guard, and, on the white tablecloth, ten bottles neatly wrapped in brown paper by his obliging wife and numbered by her current assistant, the perpetually distracted James. One of a procession of helpers in love with wine, soon disabused of the notion that caddying for the critic is a spiritual pastime, he has removed the foils and poured an equal amount of wine from each bottle into a stemmed glass elegantly constricted at the rim.

CJ pauses, slightly elevating his nostrils, priming them with a barely perceptible twitch, angling in the direction of the sideboard. He has detected an alien odor among the familiar ones. Ah, the felt pen, left behind with the top off, the acrid smell emanating from evaporating ink. "Ja-hames!"

The door swings open and in steps the ingratiating amanuensis. In Bordeaux he would be wearing, at the very least, a buttoned-up shirt, but in California it’s open-necked rugby-style, with jeans: the uniform. Fuzz on the chin, smiling—everyone in California smiles—the young man’s big brown eyes denoting apprehension. What’s up, CJ?

"The Magic Marker’s up, James."

Shit. Sorry about that.

James scoops it up, smacks the cap in place, and goes back through the revolving door. A handsome lad, maybe a tad too handsome, chastened but overdue for remaindering; has Claire found something of value in James beyond his ability to heft wine cartons, open bottles, and run the dishwasher? (No detergent!) But now Craven-Jones is distracted by the right smells: Cabernet Sauvignon’s infinity of masked components, its glorious potential enhanced by caresses of Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot, Merlot, even Malbec, as well as oak and the panoply of botanical associations that push all else from his mind and bring to his palate an anticipatory wetness.

Almost daintily he takes his chair and eyes the delectable prey. The tease before the main event, the vinous equivalent of a naked woman walking around a boxing ring holding aloft a placard with a number on it. Where are the muscles and firm flesh, where the flab? Who will have the up-front power and fruit, who the longest finish in this matchup of potential champions? Sports references are absolutely necessary for communication in this, his chosen country, but CJ knows little of sport beyond the terrible memories of rugby in the damp desolation of his Midlands preparatory school. Metaphorically, he favors sumo wrestling: enormous combatants pushing at each other, stately, powerful.

At his elbow sits a cut-glass bowl full of air-popped corn, sans butter and salt, the perfect palate cleanser: weightless mopper-up of all vestiges of sampled wine. The popcorn’s smell reminds CJ of his gnawing hunger, to be put off until lunch, which today will commence with wafer-thin sole fillets over which scalding French butter has been poured, no other cooking required, complemented by a slightly chilled Puligny-Montrachet.

He’s getting ahead of himself; dining follows due labor, the reigning Craven-Jones maxim. Meanwhile, no flaw shall pass this nose, these lips, this palate without detection, no shortcoming shall go unannounced in what Claire calls his doomsday book—dooming as many as it raises up, more actually—Craven-Jones on Wine, printed on actual paper, with a paid circulation of 120,000 and a pass-along influence of, yes, a million. Craven-Jones on Wine often breaks, as well as makes, reputations, vintages, business deals, marriages, even lives. Such is his power and, of course, his burden.

Ready now, nasal chambers cleared with a mild saline solution, his copiousness fondly settled into the custom-made reinforced rolling chair set high enough to prevent his having to bend his knees, he passes flared nostrils over the glasses first, guessing the species of oak from which the barrels were made that until recently held these gems. Limoges? Allier. My God, Arkansas! He will soon know exactly who made the wines and how long the fruit hung on the vines, the blend, the barrel regimen, the fining agent, and how well they sell on the futures market depends upon his evaluation.

He picks up a glass by the stem and angles it, examining the color against the white tablecloth. Deeply mauve, Cabernet’s own depthless version of purple, concentrated to the rim. Ah, these New World hues. His fellow Brits reeled in their presence, but CJ came to love them as a deliverer from the anonymous life of bottle drudge in the chilly cellars of Lily & Sons, Ltd., City of London, scribbling reviews for the firm’s newssheet.

Compressing now one nostril with a forefinger and passing the glass under the other, he inhales deeply. The olfactory equivalent of matins in a village chapel go off in a brain inculcated with associations: black cherries, currants, brambles, lanolin, tobacco, cedar, chocolate. But also flaws: blatant woodiness—it’s well known that Clyde Craven-Jones disapproves of harsh tannins—and a good but hardly spectacular finish.

He ejects a purple stream into the bowl, scribbles gobs of fruit … too-rapid falling-off on the middle palate … predictable, and moves on to the next bottle.

*   *   *

An hour and twenty minutes later he leans back in his wheeled throne and sighs. Nine bottles down and not a clear winner. He thinks he knows who made half of them and can come close to guessing the rest. Two hover in the mid- to upper teens of his twenty-point ranking system, which will make their investors moderately happy, but no ecstasy in this tasting. If the mystery wine’s among them, then it’s merely good.

The brown wrapping paper disguises the last bottle, emblazoned with the number 10, the poured wine in the Riedel deeply hued. He pulls the glass to him, picks it up by the stem, and quickly, deftly twists his wrist, driving the wine high up the sides. Its concentrated fragrance reaches him even from that distance. He dips his nose directly into the invisible pool of inspiration and inhales. He’s impressed by the wine’s power, and annoyed: surely this is not the mystery bottle, which means he failed to detect the interloper among the previous nine. He scribbles barely ripe black fruit … toasty … a lean, shimmering nimbus of cassis.

He takes a mouthful and holds it for a moment, lips parted, drawing air in over the wine, then closes his mouth and, without swallowing, exhales through the nose, pushing the sacred ether of harvest and extracted oak, as he often puts it in his lectures, back out through his nostrils, with a surprising result. He’ll describe it as reverberating Cabernet bells. St. Paul’s? Too grandiose. A chapel? Too parochial. This wine tolls on the nose with all the power and precision of Christopher Wren’s gem, the Church of St. Mary-le-Bow.… If you can fully appreciate that complex melody, you’re not Cockney, you’re enchanted!

He swallows, the cascading flavors identifiable, married in an onslaught of what he thinks of as the essence of Bordeaux, not California—elegant, balanced, with a long trail on the palate that dwindles into the soothing convergence of light and shadow in a distant clearing.… Yes, that will do nicely. The wine might well be one of Bordeaux’s best, from a first-growth estate, introduced as a joke. Detectable tannins but overall so silky as to be forgiven. Less heat around the gums, meaning relatively low alcohol.

It could represent the glory of France, but the initial, decisive burst of fruit and lingering ripeness has the power of California. Has someone finally managed to make a wine in the valley with the contradictory merits of France and America, or is this a con? If so, it’s near the top of the chart and worth a great deal of money.

He takes a fistful of popcorn and crams it into his mouth, snowing all over his sweats. Now for the sobering second swallow, the true test. He tears the wrapper off the bottle and is confronted by a column of dark liquid in generic glass; that he has no idea whose this wine is or where it came from is humiliating. A wine critic without self-confidence is—how did he put it at the Friends of Wine lecture in San Francisco the week before?—in the evening of his being.

In the frenzy of stripping No. 10 he has upset No. 6, spilling inky Cabernet over the white tablecloth. He attempts to mop it up with the wrapping paper, without success. More tearing to expose the other bottles, an array of family and fanciful names—Eagle Ridge, Block 69, Trifecta, Copernicus. He knows them all and he knows their makers; No. 10 is indeed the interloper.

CJ confronts the wreckage of his tasting, takes another swallow. Ah, is there anything better than a glass of fine red wine of an afternoon? Well, of a morning, actually. He can feel the alcohol now, not just No. 10’s but the collective onslaught of the wines he has absorbed despite spitting, a hazard of his profession.

He peruses his notes. Numbers 2 and 5—Block 69 and Trifecta—are clearly the standouts, after No. 10. What comes next is tricky. He stands and pads to the hallway door, opens it a crack, softly whistles. Then, Missy.

A scrabble of claws on heartwood Douglas fir, a blur of brindle hair ejecting from the bedroom, smiling if a mastiff can be said to smile, her soft brown eyes full of anticipation. He reaches down and digs his fingertips into her wiry coat, but the dog brushes past him.

CJ eases the door shut and returns to the disarray of the tasting. Bracing himself with one hand, he slowly kneels, groaning, and places the two winners on the floor while Missy watches, a timeless scene: dog, master, quarry. Older than history.

Go!

Missy creeps forward and tentatively smells each glass in turn. She settles on Trifecta.

Back!

She obeys, still eying the glasses as if they might take flight, and waits while he crawls forward, carefully blocking her view. He replaces Block 69 with No. 10. If Missy picks the mystery wine, this will complement his olfactory abilities since she’s infallible, and very close to his own palate.

He crawls out of the way, sweeping aside wine-soaked wrapping paper and dropped pencils. Spilled wine drips through the crack between the leaves in the table; popcorn litters the carpet.

Go!

Used to the drill, Missy sniffs at Trifecta, then at the interloper, hesitates, and stays with the nameless wine. Ah, says CJ proudly, since it’s his choice too. He has to remind himself—down on all fours—that this colleague is, after all, just an animal.

3

I THINK I’VE FOUND IT.

What? Claire sat resolutely at the desk in the living room, the valley spread before her a constant distraction from proofreading the galleys for the next Craven-Jones on Wine, which must be shipped this morning to the printer. He said, A perfect score for a California Cabernet, if that’s what the mystery wine proves to be. A very long shot, I grant you.

She turned, more perturbed than pleased. Really? How do you know it’s California?

I don’t. Could be a Bordeaux, a Mouton, possibly. But I think it’s local. Big nose, briary, just enough forward fruit. Fine tannins. Deucedly annoying, I must say, slipping that bottle in here. How dare they?

Twenty points for a California Cab would be a big deal, CJ.

Oh, yes, and defensible in this case. If it is a California. My God, the length of the finish…

Readers would be enthralled, said Claire, biting reflexively on her 3B. But how would we possibly find out whose it is?

Haven’t the vaguest. We might … perhaps announce the conundrum in this issue and ask the culprit to step forward. Something along those lines.

The notion would once have been too preposterous to consider, but now Craven-Jones on Wine and its hemorrhaging circulation, if truth be told, needed a boost. CJ blamed the slump in his readership on the blogs, but he had other problems as well. For one thing, ranking wines by numbers had begun to lose its luster, and without that simple alternative to describing a very complex substance, he was in trouble, being no prose stylist.

Half the valley would get in line, said Claire.

Yes, and then we’d deal with it.

He meant she would deal with it, although he would help, of course. CJ’s was the most prestigious list of secretive collectors on the West Coast; one of them might have heard of the elaborate charade of secretly submitting a wine. Part of CJ’s burden was to chase it down, or see that it was chased down. "I’m considering writing a paragraph about this and inserting it in this issue today: ‘Extraordinary discovery, if legitimate. Readers deserve to know, et cetera.’ Add that it will take time to track down the owner and authenticate his wine. But in the next issue we will pull the veil. I say, shall we bump lunch up a